For eighteen days, I have been calling for strong offensive action against the terrorists of the Palestinian Authority – both Hamas and Fatah – as the best way to find the teenage hostages and to deter future kidnappings and other terrorist attacks. Now that the boys have been found dead, the justification and necessity for very strong offensive action is even greater.

It should come as no shock that the boys were murdered, for this is the mentality of the Islamic terrorist that is sworn to the destruction of Israel and doesn’t distinguish between soldiers and civilians.

We Jews are different. We respect life. However, in a time of war, the rules are not the same, and we are certainly in an ongoing war for our survival. Saul, the first king of ancient Israel, was removed from the throne by Samuel the Prophet because he didn’t completely obliterate the enemy’s animals, even though he did destroy virtually all of the enemy’s people.

Yes, Saul was in defiance of a specific command to obliterate the Amalekites, but the general lesson for our times is clear: When fighting a war against an enemy, the enemy must be destroyed, and decisively, without excessive concern for who is an active soldier.

However, the first step is to identify the enemy. In this case, the enemy is not just Hamas, which kidnapped and murdered the teenage boys and has been firing rockets at Israeli cities from their strongholds in Gaza for years. The enemy is also Fatah, which in addition to its own horrific list of terrorist attacks, sits proudly in a unity coalition with Hamas and pays the substantial  salaries of all of the terrorists.

And yes, the enemy is also the civilians who voted these two terrorist organizations into power. Not every German was an active Nazi, just as not every Gazan is an active Hamas member, and not every Arab resident of Samaria is an active member of Fatah paying the terrorists to kill Jewish children.

Nonetheless, an enemy is an enemy and the only way to win this war is to destroy the enemy, without excessive regard for who is a soldier and who is a civilian. In Dresden, in Berlin, in Nagasaki, and in Hiroshima, the Americans and/or their allies massively bombed enemy-controlled cities into submission, killing hundreds of thousands of enemy civilians and causing the enemy’s political leadership to surrender. The only way to win a war is by hitting them very, very hard and ignoring international condemnation.

Last but not least, we Jews will always aim our bombs primarily at military targets, but there is absolutely no need to feel guilty about “disrupting the lives of”, and killing or wounding enemy civilians who are almost entirely Hamas and Fatah supporters. Yes, it is absolutely relevant to point out that they are staunch supporters of two of the world’s most notorious terrorist organizations that are sworn to Israel’s destruction, and therefore, they are our enemy.

It’s time for the new Gaza First Plan – Let the bombing rounds begin on the Hamas-controlled cities of Gaza and may the bombing soon extend to the Mukata – PA/Fatah President Mahmoud Abbas’s PA terrorist headquarters in Ramallah, which should be totally leveled to the ground. Yes, destroy the Hamas in Gaza completely, until the white flags of surrender will decorate the streets, but then focus on totally disarming and dismantling the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority that has been paying the salaries of all the terrorists for many years, including those of the Hamas.

Destroy the enemy. The time to act and to act decisively is now.

Reprinted with author’s permission